The Affordable Care Act expansion of Medicaid eligibility in 2010 greatly expanded health insurance coverage for individuals living in poverty, but because some states have chosen not to expand, there remains a sizable population of eligible individuals without Medicaid. I examine poverty rates of expansion-eligible individuals using two different measures of poverty across those who are and are not enrolled in Medicaid. Findings show that when measured using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, considered to be a more accurate indicator, those not enrolled in Medicaid are more likely to live in poverty than those enrolled in Medicaid. Furthermore, these results are due in part to higher outof-pocket medical expenses for those not on Medicaid. I include a discussion of these findings, along with implications for policy.

The past three decades have seen unprecedented technological development, with major impacts on labour markets and the economy as a whole. This column investigates how automation and the increased use of computers has affected productivity trends over the last three decades. Results suggest that automation has had a strong effect on slowing down aggregate productivity, despite raising it at the micro level. This is due to the reallocation of factor inputs across occupations and industries.

This paper studies the effect of spatial sorting on inequality through two channels: spatial differences in technology and the endogenous organization of production. First, I document a new fact on the spatial differences in the organization of production. The number of workers per manager is decreasing in city size, overall and within industries. I develop and quantify a model of a system of cities where workers with different skills organize in production teams. The model yields continuous wage distributions in cities of different sizes that resemble the data.

CEOs allocate more investment capital to male managers than to female managers in the same divisions. Using data from individual Census records, we find that this gender gap is driven by CEOs who grew up in male-dominated families — those where the father was the only income earner and had more education than the mother. The gender gap also increases for CEOs who attended all-male high schools and grew up in neighborhoods with greater gender inequality. The effect of gender on capital budgeting introduces frictions and erodes investment efficiency. Overall, the gender gap originates in CEO preferences developed during formative years and produces significant real effects.

This article examines the relationships between Ohio State University and the surrounding urban University District neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio, between 1920–2015. A mythic chronology of “rise and fall” marks university and community memory and conversations about the district, past and present. Interrogating the demographic, architectural, and historic underpinnings of this contested chronology, I explore the differences between Ohio State’s discourse and neighborhood activists’ and residents’ conceptions of neighborhood change and various aspects of a golden-age myth. In particular, I focus upon the interplay between demography, imagery, and memory or between population changes, architectural changes, and various actors’ perceptions and memories of such changes. Significant moments in the twentieth-century interactions between the neighborhoods and the university, especially contested urban renewal, suggest a complex set of relationships between a large urban land-grant institution and its neighboring urban area.

A prominent class of instruments combines local shares with aggregate shifts. We demonstrate that estimates using these “shift-share” instruments are inherently vulnerable to bias from dynamic adjustments to past shocks. To illustrate, we show that estimates of the partial equilibrium impact of immigration on wages employing a frequently-used shift-share instrument are unlikely to identify a causal effect. We propose a dynamic variant of the shift-share estimator that yields consistent and substantially more negative estimates than those using the conventional instrument. Our results are a cautionary tale for a large body of empirical work relying on shiftshare instruments for causal inference.

Trade was a central issue in the 2016 US presidential election, with both major party candidates debating how trade impacts American workers. However, the current literature on trade policy outcomes and inequality has insufficient measures of public opinion on trade. I examine the varying roles the public and interest groups play in the trade policy formation process as inequality changes in democratic societies. I expect, as inequality increases, the public and mass based interest groups will have less resources to expend on influencing policymakers. Also, as inequality increases economic elites’ and business interest groups’ resources will increase, and they will use these increased resources to take advantage of this gap in influence left by the public and mass based interest groups, to increasingly control policy. To test this theory, I examine the influence public opinion and interest groups have on trade agreement support among US senators and trade openness in Latin American States. The results are mixed, interest groups in favor of trade and against trade have influence over trade policy in the United States at all levels of inequality, while in Latin America the public views groups in favor of trade as becoming more powerful as inequality increases, and groups against trade becoming less powerful. In both cases, the results for the public point to the middle class, and not the upper class, having the most influence over policy, while those at the bottom have no influence.

Although it is well known that the durable nature of housing amplifies downturns, an overlooked mechanism by which this occurs is through shifts in the ownership status of local housing stocks. Based on census and American Housing Survey data, I show that there is a 2 percent net shift of single family U.S. housing stock into the rental sector with each passing decade. Short term transitions following the 2007 crash were larger, exceeding 10 percent for recently built homes, and should partially reverse as markets rebound. Indeed, in recent years,18 fewer construction permits were filed for every 100 post-crash own-to-rent transitions, about the same effect as from vacant housing. These and other patterns confirm that housing stock transitions contribute to filtering of older housing down to lower income families and slow recovery following a negative shock.

This dissertation considers how changes in organizations and product markets contributed to rising earnings inequality and wage stagnation since the 1970s. The first chapter shows how the spread of unequal bargaining relations between corporate buyers and their suppliers has slowed wage growth for workers. Since the 1970s, market restructuring has shifted many workers into workplaces heavily reliant on sales to outside corporate buyers. These outside buyers wield substantial power over working conditions among their suppliers. During the same period, wage growth for middle-income workers stagnated. By extending organizational theories of wage-setting to incorporate interactions between organizations, I predict that wage stagnation resulted in part from production workers’ heightened exposure to buyer power. Panel data on publicly traded companies shows that dependence on large buyers lowers suppliers’ wages and accounts for 10 percent of wage stagnation in nonfinancial firms since the 1970s. These results are robust to a series of supplementary measures of buyer power; instrumental variable analysis using mergers between buyers; corrections for selection and missing data; and controls for individual worker characteristics like education and occupation. The results show how product market restructuring and new forms of economic segmentation affect workers’ wages. The second chapter assesses the contribution of job reorganization to rising within-firm earnings inequality. During the period of rising U.S. earnings inequality, many employers revived management practices in which complex and routine tasks are divided between higherand lower-paid jobs. This article theorizes this process as job distillation and distinguishes it from other sources of increasing organization-level earnings inequality. To test the earnings effects of job distillation, panel models are fit using linked employer-employee data on employees working for U.S. labor unions. These administrative data include a rare direct measure of task content, which is validated via a survey of union representatives. Variance function regression shows that job distillation increases inequality within organizations. This effect is driven by separating routine and complex tasks across jobs and by lowering earnings as jobs are simplified with respect to tasks. These findings demonstrate that classic concerns in the sociology of work should be brought back into the study of inequality. The distribution of earnings hinges on the allocation of tasks into jobs. The third chapter traces changing patterns of worker mobility across jobs. Since the 1970s, changing employment relations seem to have eroded the role played by organizations in shaping worker mobility and earnings. As internal labor markets have declined, organizations no longer buffer workers from competitive labor markets. Yet at the same time, worker mobility between firms, through the external labor market, has declined. I compare the earnings and occupational attainment effects of job mobility within- and between-organizations. Due to declining worker mobility between-employers, within-organization mobility makes up an increasing share of overall job-to-job mobility. However, contrary to predictions made by theories of internal labor markets, within-firm transitions decreasingly consist of moves associated with earnings increases or upward occupational mobility. Part of this decline in the pay-off to internal moves stems from a shifting mobility age structure, in which a within-firm job changers are older and less likely to benefit from within-firm mobility. These findings suggest that movement between jobs within organizations remains important, but that these moves provide less advantage for workers than they did previously.

Objective: This article explores the effect of the racial structure of inequality on redistributive policy in the states. Methods: Applying measures developed in Hero and Levy (2016), we use fixed effects regressions to assess the impact of between-race inequality on multiple measures of state welfare effort and generosity. Results: We find a strong negative association between racial inequality and all measures of welfare policy. The total level of inequality and the racial composition of the population, by contrast, are not associated with the welfare policy measures. The impact of racial inequality emerges after, but does not appear before, the 1996 national welfare reform that increased states’ discretion over welfare policy. Conclusion: These findings illustrate that the influence of income inequality on public policy is strongly conditioned by racial “structure.”

Only a handful of macro-level studies of homicide clearance exist, and the impact of community characteristics is mixed. In addition, community members are critical to clearances, but the willingness of residents to unite for the collective goal of aiding in investigations (via collective efficacy) remains to be tested. Combining data from the Chicago Police Department, Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and U.S. Census, we estimate the effect of collective efficacy on homicide clearances in Chicago neighborhoods, while taking into account neighborhood characteristics and case composition. Results indicate that economic disadvantage, residential stability, and victimization significantly decrease homicides clearances, while collective efficacy increases clearances.

In recent decades, racial segregation has declined while income segregation has increased and continues to intensify, but past studies have failed to estimate the effects of income segregation through causal methods. I measure the intergenerational mobility gap between children with low income and high income parents by gender in response to higher levels of income segregation at the county-level. A causal estimate is approached through an original instrumental variables strategy that uses income sorting of census tracts following the construction of the interstate highway system. Neighborhoods in close proximity to a highway experience a negative disamenity effect from the noise and pollution generated from the highway but also receive access benefits from using the faster transportation network. I find that income segregation leads to less upward mobility for children from both low income and high income backgrounds, and in particular exacerbates income disparity among boys. These results show that the correlational estimates of previous studies have underestimated the effects of income segregation and shed light on the impacts of transportation infrastructure on the shape of the income distribution.

The United States operates the world's largest refugee resettlement program. However, there is almost no systematic evidence on whether refugees successfully integrate into American society over the long run. We address this gap by drawing on linked administrative data to directly measure a long-term integration outcome: naturalization rates. Assessing the full population of refugees resettled between 2000 and 2010, we find that refugees naturalize at high rates: 66% achieved citizenship by 2015. This rate is substantially higher than among other immigrants who became eligible for citizenship during the same period. We also find significant heterogeneity in naturalization rates. Consistent with the literature on immigration more generally, sociodemo-graphic characteristics condition the likelihood of naturalization. Women, refugees with longer residency, and those with higher education levels are more likely to obtain citizenship. National origins also matter. While refugees from Iran, Iraq, and Somalia naturalize at higher rates, those from Burma, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Liberia naturalize at lower rates. We also find naturalization success is significantly shaped by the initial resettlement location. Placing refugees in areas that are urban, have lower rates of unemployment , and have a larger share of conationals increases the likelihood of acquiring citizenship. These findings suggest pathways to promote refugee integration by targeting interventions and by optimizing the geographic placement of refugees. immigration | refugees | integration | naturalization | resettlement T he United States operates the world's largest refugee resettlement program, having resettled over 3 million refugees since 1975. While resettlement provides humanitarian protection and the chance to begin a new life, refugees nevertheless face significant challenges after arrival. Many arrive having experienced trauma and interrupted education and lacking knowledge concerning English and American culture. While refugees frequently experience significant psychological and physical hardship in their origin countries, they are also likely to encounter discrimination, lack of opportunity, and poverty within their new environment (1-3). The challenges that refugees face after arrival provide clear incentives for governments and nongovernmental organizations to facilitate refugees' adaptation to life in the United States. However, these barriers to integration also raise questions for policymakers. Every year, policymakers decide how many refugees to admit, from which sending countries, and where to send them in the United States. Although these decisions are primarily made on the basis of humanitarian need, expectations concerning whether refugees will be able to attain self-sufficiency and integrate into American society also play a role in shaping the contours of the program (4, 5). Moreover, whether refugees successfully integrate can be expected to influence public support for refugee resettlement. However, despite the scale and salience of the resettlement program and the policy challenges that surround it, policymakers and scholars currently lack reliable data on the degree to which refugees succeed in adapting to life within the United States. Refugee outcomes are limited to short-term employment indicators and are only directly tracked by refugee resettlement agencies for the first 90-180 d, after which refugees and their families are expected to transition to economic self-sufficiency. The scattered data that exist after this initial period largely consist of anecdotal evidence, convenience samples (6), or imputed data from partial population surveys (7, 8). None of these sources permits a direct and accurate portrait of the degree to which refugees integrate into American society. The lack of data on long-term integration outcomes is concerning from a policy perspective. It means that policymakers cannot learn from past successes or failures and harness this evidence in the design of refugee programs. Knowledge of outcomes would also permit policymakers to directly identify subpopulations of refugees who require targeted support or to implement innovations that could improve long-term integration outcomes. The absence of systematic evidence on integration outcomes also increases the challenge of maintaining political support in hosting communities. To address this evidence gap, we draw on linked administrative data to provide a systematic analysis of the long-term integration of refugees within the United States. We focus on naturalization, which the scholarly literature has identified as a key measure of the political, civic, and social integration of immigrants. In contrast to previous approaches, we directly measure naturalization rates using administrative data maintained by the Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) at the Department of Homeland Security. These data span the complete population of refugees resettled in the period between 2000 and 2010, and include background characteristics as well as linked naturalization outcomes. Citizenship is widely regarded as an important milestone of immigrant integration, and naturalization rates are commonly Significance Despite the scale of the US refugee resettlement program, policymakers and the public lack systematic information on how refugees adapt to their new environment. We focus on natu-ralization as a key measure of integration and draw on administrative data to provide direct estimates of the naturalization rates among refugees. Our results show that, on average, refugees acquire citizenship faster than other lawful permanent residents. We also identify the set of factors that promote or constrain naturalization among refugees. These findings have implications for policymakers seeking to improve the integration of refugees within the United States.

As a country, we want to ensure that people have access to basic supports, including food, healthcare, and housing. Women are more likely than men to face economic insecurity at all stages of their lives, due to ongoing employment discrimination, overrepresentation in low-wage jobs, difficulty accessing affordable, comprehensive health care, and greater responsibilities for unpaid caregiving. As a result, programs and policies that protect health, ensure access to high-quality child care and higher education, and help people meet their basic needs are essential to women and their families.

Basic assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program) and Medicaid ensure families have access to food and medical care when they are low-income. Some policymakers at the federal and state levels intend to add new work requirements to SNAP and Medicaid. In this paper, we analyze those who would be impacted by an expansion of work requirements in SNAP and an introduction of work requirements into Medicaid. We characterize the types of individuals who would face work requirements, describe their labor force experience over 24 consecutive months, and identify the reasons why they are not working if they experience a period of unemployment or labor force nonparticipation. We find that the majority of SNAP and Medicaid participants who would be exposed to work requirements are attached to the labor force, but that a substantial share would fail to consistently meet a 20 hours per week–threshold. Among persistent labor force nonparticipants, health issues are the predominant reason given for not working. There may be some subset of SNAP and Medicaid participants who could work, are not working, and might work if they were threatened with the loss of benefits. This paper adds evidence to a growing body of research that shows that this group is very small relative to those who would be sanctioned under the proposed policies who are already working or are legitimately unable to work.

The repeated failure of Ireland's potato crop in the late 1840s led to a major famine and a surge in migration to the US. We build a dataset of Irish immigrants and their sons by linking males from 1850 to 1880 US census records. For comparison, we also link German and British immigrants, their sons, and males from US native-headed households. We document a decline in the observable human capital of famine-era Irish migrants compared to pre-famine Irish migrants and to other groups in the 1850 census, as well as worse labor market outcomes. The disparity in labor market outcomes persists into the next generation when immigrants’ and natives’ sons are compared in 1880. Nonetheless, we find strong evidence of intergenerational convergence in that famine-era Irish sons experienced a much smaller gap in occupational status than their fathers. The disparities are even smaller when the Irish children are compared to those from observationally similar native white households. A descriptive analysis of mobility for the famine-era Irish sons indicates that more Catholic surnames and birth in Ireland were associated with less upward mobility. Our results contribute to literatures on immigrant assimilation, refugee migration, and the Age of Mass Migration.

Many countries have reduced refugee admissions in recent years, in part due to fears that refugees and asylum seekers increase crime rates and pose a national security risk. We provide evidence on the effects of refugee resettlement on crime, leveraging a natural experiment in the United States, where an Executive Order by the president in January 2017 halted refugee resettlement. We find that, despite a 65.6% drop in refugee resettlement, there is no discernible e↵ect on county-level crime rates. These null e↵ects are consistent across all types of crime. Overall, the results suggest that crime rates would have been similar had refugee arrivals continued at previous levels.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act included a new federal incentive-Opportunity Zones-to spur investment in low-income and undercapitalized communities. This incentive could become the nation's largest economic development "program," but its potential for positive impact depends first on the decisions of America's governors. April 20, 2018 was the final deadline for governors (and the mayor of the District of Columbia) to select which among the roughly 56 percent of eligible census tracts should be classified as Opportunity Zones. Of the eligible tracts, governors were able to designate 25 percent (or at least 25 tracts in states with fewer than 100 qualified tracts) as Opportunity Zones. The incentive provides the following three tax benefits for equity investing in Opportunity Zones: Permanent exclusion of taxable income on new gains. For investments held for at least 10 years, investors pay no taxes on capital gains produced through their investment in Opportunity Funds (the investment vehicle that makes investments in Opportunity Zones).  Basis step-up of capital gains invested. For capital gains placed in Opportunity Funds for at least five years, investors' basis on the original investment is increased 10 percent. If invested for at least seven years, investors' basis on the original investment is increased 15 percent.  Temporary deferral of capital gains. Investors can place existing assets with accumulated capital gains into Opportunity Funds. Those capital gains are not taxed until the end of 2026 or when the asset is disposed of.

Publicized disputes between groups of scientists may force lay choices about groups credibility. One possible, little studied, credibility cue is vote-counting (proportions of scientists on either side): for example, 97% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change. An online sample of 2600 Americans read a mock article about a scientific dispute, in a 13 (proportions: 100%-0%, 99%-1%, 50%-50%, 1%-99%, 0%-100% for Positions A and B, respectively)8 (scenarios: for example, dietary salt, dark matter) between-person experiment. Respondents reported reactions to the dispute, attitudes toward the topic, and views on science. Proportional information indirectly affected judged agreement but less so topic or science responses, controlling for scenarios and moderators, whether by actual proportions or differing contrasts of consensus versus near-consensus. Given little empirical research with conflicting findings, even these low effect sizes warrant further research on how vote-counting might help laypeople deal with scientific disputes.

From 1996 to 2013, a total of 19 states and Washington, D.C. adopted medical marijuana laws (MML). Early adolescent marijuana use correlates with several problems later in life, including job-related skill acquisition, illegal substance abuse, and educational attainment. This paper examines the negative externalities of MML on educational attainment by applying a difference-in-differences research design. The results show that MML decrease high school graduation rates by 0.36 percentage points, indicating that nearly 13,000 students will not graduate as a result of the MML implementation.